SHRINES OF BRITISH GLORY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 20128, 23 April 1928, Page 2

SHRINES OF BRITISH GLORY

SALISBURY The history of the cathedral city of Salisbury has been a most uneventful one, but there are few spots in Great Britain which are richer in their literary associations, while in the near vicinity of the city are to be found two of the most interesting relics of ancient Britain, the remains of Old Saturn and Stonehenge. Old Sarum is a place of utter desolation lying to the north of Salisbury, and consists of a great mound of earth guarded by a ditch and an embankment, the summit of which is hollowed cut in the form of a crater and surrounded by a rampart, forming a wall over a hundred feet deep on its inner side. It was one of the chief fortresses of the ancient Britons, and in Saxon times was famous as the capital of King Cerdic, the founder of the kingdoin’of Wessex, and also as the place selected by King Edgar for the meeting of the national assembly which was cal'ed. together to devise some means of checking the Danish invaders. In 1075 Old Sarum became the seat of a bishopric, but in the early part of the 13th century it was decided to remove the cathedral to a more pleasant and convenient location on the banks of the River Avon, and thus commenced the foundation of the city of Salisbury. The new cathedral was begun and finished in a period of 38 years by Bishop Poore, and in 1258 was consecrated by Archbishop Boniface in the presence of Henry 111. It is the only English cathedral that was commenced and finished in one style of architecture., the pure Gothic of the first half of the 13th century, and the structure is surmounted by a spire, the highest bi the country, which rises to a height of 404 feet from the ground.

It contains numerous ancient monuments, including the shrine of St. Osmund, the second bishop of Old Sarum, who died in 1099 and was canonised in 1457. and the tomb of Bishop Horman, which was removed intact from the old cathedral. Among its most interesting memorials arc those of Lord Hungerford, who fought by the side of Henry V. at Agincourt; Sir John de Alontacutc, one of the heroes of the Battle of Crecy; William Longspee, the son of Henry IL and the Fair Rosamund, who was the first Earl of Salisbury; and Sir John Cheyney, who bore the standard of Richard 111. at the Battle of Bosworth; while in its Aluniment Room is a contemporary copy of Afagna Charta.

One of its many famous bishops was Gilbert Burnett, at one time the chaplain of William oft Orange, who advocated the right of Alary to share the British throne with her husband and proposed the title of William and Alary which was adapted by the monarchs. He is principally famous as the author of a most entertaining chronicle of the days in which ho lived, entitled—“ The History of Aly Own Times,” in which, to quote Horace Walpole, “It seems as if he had just come from the king’s closet, or from “the apartment of the men whom he describes, and was telling his readers, “in plain honest terms, what he had seen and heard.” After the Battle of Worcester in 1651, when Cromwell defeated the great Scottish army which had marched into England to put Charles 11. on the throne, the future Alerry Alonarch found shelter in one of the Canon’s homes at Salisbury while a little band of Royalists met at the nearby “King’s Arms’’ Hotel to make plans for his escape to France. Thirty-eight years later James 11. waited in the city in fear and trembling while his successor, William of Orange, was being proclaimed King at Exeter.

In the market place is a statue of Lord Herbert of Lea, who represented the city in the House of Commons and was Alinister of War during the Crimean campaign, in which capacity he was responsible for the sending of Florence Nightingale out to the front on her errand of mercy, while the statue of another famous Paarliamentary member, Professor Fawcett, the blind statesman, faces the house in which he was born.

The city has figured prominently in the works of our illustrious novelists. It is the Barchestcr of Anthony Trollope an»d the Melchester of Thomas Hardy, and-Henry Fielding wrote a great part of “Tome Jones” while living at Salisbury, where he found the original of his immortal Thwackhum in a master of the local grammar school. In Dickens’ “Alartin Chuzzlewit” the cathedral figures as the building which the unfortunate pupils of Mr Pecksniff drew -from all points of view, and in 1848 the great novelist visited the city with John Forster, his biographer, Alark Lemon, the editor of Punch, and John Leech, the cartoonist.

Philip Alassinger, the dramatist and contemporary of Shakespeare, was born in the city, where he found the original of Sir Giles Overreach in a member of the ancient family of Mompesson, whose town house still stands in the vicinity of the cathedral, while later on Joseph Addison received his early education at the Close Grammar School before proceeding to the Charterhouse, and the greater part of “The Beggar’s Opera” was written by Thomas Gay in the grounds of the nearby Amesbury Abbey.

In 1654 John Evelyn records in his diary that he had visited the cathedral, which he described as the completes! piece of Gothic work in Europe, and.: his friend, Samuel Pepys, who visited the city fourteen years later, tells us in his entertaining journal that he had slept on a bed of silk at the “Old George" Hotel, and that on the following day he had explored the city and the cathedral, describing the latter as handsomer than the Abbey at Westminster.

The meaning of the great circle of massive stones known as Stonehenge, which stands on Salisbury Plain a short distance from the city, is veiled in mystery, but it is generally believed to be the remains of an ancient Druid temple, although several historians in Saxon days record that it was a memorial of the 400 British nobles who were treacherously slain on the spot in 475 by Hengist. the Saxon chieftain.